Cloud computing, as the general process for network-based/remote processing is known, offers several advantages over local computing, especially in the context of application software: agility, cost reduction, reliability, scalability, performance, and ease of maintenance. Cloud-computing applications also present unique challenges, however, related to deployment, machine provision in a cloud provider, and the installation of the application software. For example, the deployment process might fail and need to be restarted several times before the application is fully deployed, and this restart process must be done gracefully so that no data is lost (known as “idempotency”). The provisioning of more resources than necessary is wasteful, and should be avoided or minimized. Different application software may have different requirements in terms of operating systems or available software utilities, and these requirements must be met. Finally, if the application is deployed on different servers or systems, data dependencies between the various servers (known as “bindings”) must be respected such that, for example, if a first server needs the results from a second server to be deployed, that dependency is tracked and managed. A need therefore exists for a way to automatically, reliably, and replicatably manage the deployment of cloud-based applications.